Philosophy

Category archives for Philosophy

(From here.) Not that we won’t make plenty of other mistakes, but they’ll run more to Nietzsche than Rand. Come to think of it, the eternal recurrence test is probably just right for bedtime stories, isn’t it?

I guess I suspected that this might be a problem, but it really sank in when a close colleague told me the other day that he was freaked out by it. And I’d hate to have you hear it from anyone else but me.

In my inbox today: I’m curious, what credentials (academic or otherwise) does one need to become a philosopher? For the purposes of employment in a university philosophy department, a graduate degree in philosophy (usually a Ph.D. but sometimes an M.A.) is standard. Kind of like a chemist can be expected to have a degree in…

At Philosophers’ Playground, Steve Gimbel ponders the pedagogically appropriate way to label William Dembski: I’m wrapping up work on my textbook Methods and Models: A Historical Introduction to the Philosophy of Science and have run into a question. … The evolutionary biology track’s final piece deals with William Dembski’s work on intelligent design theory. Therein…

At bedtime, after the reading of the stories, the younger Free-Ride offspring lay upon Dr. Free-Ride’s better half, and Dr. Free-Ride’s better half responded by making strangling noises. Of course, I called in from the other room to remind the children that homicide, whether intentional or accidental, is forbidden in the house. Younger offspring: I’m…

I thought I’d share a snapshot of my morning with you. For some reason, the internet seems like a good place for it. The paper promised to be about the evaluation of evidence in understanding the assassination of John F. Kennedy. What follows are the notes I took during the approximately 25 minute conference presentation,…

One of the things we’d like to be able to do with our powers of ethical reasoning is tackle situations where we’re not immediately certain of the right thing to do (or, for that matter, of the reason why the plan someone else is advocating strikes us as wrong). A common strategy (at least in…

Today we discuss an impediment to dialogue about animals in research that seems to have a special power to get people talking past each other rather than actually engaging with each other: Imprecision about the positions being staked out. Specifically, here, the issue is whether the people trying to have a dialogue are being precise…